Arts Listings

It’s not exactly High School Confidential, the interactive show Sausalito’s Antenna Theater is staging at Berkeley High through this weekend, but as an example of Antenna’s ‘Walkmanology,’ more of a tour through four years on campus compressed into 45 minutes, literally a walk-through of secondary education. 

High School has been staged twice before, at schools in Marin and San Francisco, in evolving, site-specific form, and is slated to continue at other schools throughout America. 

Chris Hardman, its creator (John Warren directed), is an alumnus of Snake Theater, probably the best-known “environmental” troupe of the ‘70s. 

More than 25 students are cast, seven in the student crew, and more than 50 voices, with tales from interviews swirling through an ambulatory auditor-spectator’s ears while strolling through the corridors and classrooms, confronted by masked (and sculpted) personnel, actual students, and a variety of conundrums to bring home the student experience. 

(The idea of High School took me back to my own—undisclosed—Bay Area alma mater, wherein with my gonzo guerrilla theater club, I put on—the operant term—a special Boot Camp for Freshman Orientation Day, with a suitably authentic Drill Sergeant, who took the incoming frosh through the wringer. The activities dean was not amused. Apparently, high school itself wasn’t meant to be theater, no matter how theatrical.) 

Antenna’s itinerary takes you from alarm clock and bus ride in the morning, to entering the doors of the campus--voices describing their thoughts on entering for the first time—through the Security Office (and an imposing cartoonish figure who escorts you out) and posing for an I.D. tag photo. Later you’ll glimpse gossipers out of the side of your eye as you stoop to open a locker, be lightly jostled by kids “cupcaking,” get mildly hazed in OCI (instead of detention) and witness through an upstairs window student brawlers with enormous 2-D arms broken up by the monolithic Security Guard. You’re taken all the way through to graduation, with the valedictorian asking, “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” Remember? 

With the tidbits of real stories and students playing students amid the masks, I found it to be, though somewhat stylized, much more realistic than my old Boot Camp routine. Strange, I had the feeling at times of being on a game show, or of writing a sociology report, based on a simulation. 

And the freshmen voices were right about getting lost, too. I did. Mistaking a Walkman cue while standing at a stop sign for us spectators, one ambling through every two minutes, I went through a door someone left ajar—and got locked out. Standing on the pavement outside, I faithfully listened to the last few moments on tape, and returned by the street to square one. 

It served me right. Too long a passive onlooker, ensconced in a padded seat in the audience, taking notes. I couldn’t cut it as participant anymore; probably couldn’t even get cast as a spear carrier. 

They gave me my diploma, anyway. I felt much more awkward and teary than at my actual ceremony decades ago, though no-one played “Pomp and Circumstance.” Maybe you can’t go home again, but High School can really get to you. 

High School  

Presented by Antenna Theater through Oct. 29 at Berkeley High School, 1980 Allston Way. One audience member enters show every minute, walks lasts 45 minutes. $20 adults, $8 students. Reservations required. (415) 332-9454, www.antenna-theater.org.